The Wind and the Beam loved the Rose, And the Rose loved one: For who recks the Wind where it blows? Or loves not the Sun?None knew whence the humble Wind stole, Poor sport of the skies: None dreamt that the Wind had a soul In its mournful sighs.O happy Beam, how canst thou prove That bright love of thine? In thy light is the proof of thy love, Thou hast but to shine.How its love can the Wind reveal? Unwelcome its sigh: Mute, mute to the Rose let it steal— Its proof is—to die!
"Nydia’s Song", often anthologised, including by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch inThe Oxford Book of Victorian Verse (1912)
Two lives that once part, are as ships that divide When, moment on moment there rushes between The one and the other, a sea,— Ah, never can fall from the days that have been A gleam on the years that shall be.
"A Lament", inThe Poetical and Dramatic Works of Sir Edward Bulmer Lytton, Bart, Vol. III (London: Chapman & Hall, 1853), p. 226
Compare "Ships that pass in the night",Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,Tales of a Wayside Inn (1863), Part III, "The Theologian's Tale: Elizabeth", IV.
He is certainly a man who bathes and "lives cleanly," (two especial charges preferred against him by Messrs. the Great Unwashed).
Dedicatory Epistle
This is the origin of the rather derogatory phrase, "the great unwashed".
It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.
The magic of the tongue is the most dangerous of all spells.
Book I, Chapter VII
Love is a very contradiction of all the elements of our ordinary nature: it makes the proud man meek,—the cheerful, sad,—the high-spirited, tame; our strongest resolutions, our hardiest energy, fall before it. Believe me, you cannot prophesy of its future effect in a man from any knowledge of his past character.
Buy my flowers—O buy—I pray! The blind girl comes from afar; If the earth be as fair as her children say, These flowers her children are!
"The Blind Flower-Girl's Song", in Book I, Chapter II
He who has loved often has loved never.
Book I, Chapter II
Nothing is so contagious as enthusiasm; it is the real allegory of the tale ofOrpheus—it moves stones, it charms brutes. Enthusiasm is the genius of sincerity, and truth accomplishes no victories without it.
Book I, Chapter VIII
There is no tongue that flatters like a lover's; and yet, in the exaggeration of his feelings, flattery seems to him commonplace.
Beauty, thou art twice blessed; thou blessest the gazer and the possessor; often at once the effect and the cause of goodness! A sweet disposition—a lovely soul—an affectionate nature—will speak in the eyes—the lips—the brows—and become the cause of beauty. On the other hand, they who have a gift that commands love, a key that opens all hearts, are ordinarily inclined to look with happy eyes upon the world—to be cheerful and serene—to hope and to confide. There is more wisdom than the vulgar dream of in our admiration of a fair face.
Book II, Chapter I
There is an old age which has more youth of heart than youth itself!
Book V, Chapter I
When the People have no other tyrant, their own public opinion becomes one.
Beneath the rule of men entirely great, The pen is mightier than the sword.
Act II, Scene II
This is the origin of the much quoted phrase "the pen is mightier than the sword". Compare: "Hinc quam sic calamus sævior ense, patet. The pen worse than the sword",Robert Burton,Anatomy of Melancholy, Part i. Sect. 2, Memb. 4, Subsect. 4.
Take away the sword— States can be saved without it!
Act II, Scene II
Ambition has no risk.
Act III, Scene I
In the lexicon of youth, which fate reserves For a bright manhood, there is no such word As "fail".
Act III, Scene I
Our glories float between the earth and heaven Like clouds which seem pavilions of the sun, And are the playthings of the casual wind.
Real philosophy seeks rather to solve than to deny.
Book II, Chapter VI
To the man who aspires to know, no man who has been the meanest student of knowledge should be unknown.
Book III, Chapter IV
Man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance.
Book IV, Chapter IV
We commenced research where modern conjecture closes its faithless wings. And with us, those were the common elements of science which the sages of to-day disdain as wild chimeras, or despair of as unfathomable mysteries.
Book V, Chapter X, Letter I
Quoted byH.P. Blavatsky,Isis Unveiled, Part One, Science, Ch. 1 (1877)
Happy the man who hath never known what it is to taste of fame—to have it is a purgatory, to want it is a hell!
Book V, Chapter I
Though Hope be a small child, she can carry a great anchor!
Book VIII, Chapter IV
Night, to the earnest soul, opens the Bible of the Universe, and on the leaves of Heaven is written,—"God is everywhere!"
Book IX, Chapter V
"It is destiny!"—phrase of the weak human heart! "It is destiny!"—dark apology for every error! The strong and virtuous admitno destiny! On earth, guides Conscience—in heaven, watches God. And destiny is but the phantom we invoke to silence the one—to dethrone the other!
Light literature,—that grace and flower of human culture, that best philosophy of all, humanizing us with gentle art, making us wise through the humours, elevated through the passions, tender in the affections of our kind.
Part I, Epilogue
The most useless creature that ever yawned at a club, or counted the vermin on his rags under the suns of Calabria, has no excuse for want of intellect.What men want is not talent, it is purpose,—in other words, not the power to achieve, but the will to labour.
Part II, Chapter XII
Why should the soul ever repose? God, its Principle, reposes never. While we speak, new worlds are sparkling forth—suns are throwing off their nebulae—nebulae are hardening into worlds. The Almighty proves His existence by creating.
The brilliant chief, irregularly great, Frank, haughty, rash,— the Rupert of debate!
Part I, Section III
In April, 1844,Benjamin Disraeli thus alluded to Lord Stanley: “The noble lord is theRupert of debate.”
Alone!—that worn-out word, So idly spoken, and so coldly heard; Yet all that poets sing, and grief hath known, Of hope laid waste, knells in that word ALONE!
Childhood and genius have the same master-organ in common—inquisitiveness. Let childhood have its way, and as it began where genius begins, it may find what genius finds.
Part I, Chapter IV
Master books, but do not let them master you. Read to live, not live to read.
Part II, Chapter I
It is not study alone that produces a writer; it isIntensity.
Part III, Chapter V
We cannot think or act, but the soul of some man, who has lived before, points the way. The dead never die.
Part IV, Chapter I
Earnest men never think in vain, though their thoughts may be errors.
Part IV, Chapter II
It is an inevitable law that a man, in spite of himself, should live for something higher than his own happiness. He cannot live in himself or for himself, however egotistical he may try to be. Every desire he has links him with others.
The heart loves repose and the soul contemplation, but the mind needs action.
Chapter LX
Believe me that the happiest act of intellect, however lofty, is that which enables it to be cheerfully at home with the Real!
Chapter LXXIII
Be prepared for either wisdom through joy, or wisdom through grief. Enough that, looking only through the mechanism by which this mortal world is impelled and improved, you know that cruelty is impossible to wisdom.
The man who succeeds above his fellows is the one who, early in life, clearly discerns his object, and towards that object habitually directs his powers. Even genius itself is but fine observation strengthened by fixity of purpose. Every man who observes vigilantly and resolves steadfastly grows unconsciously into genius.
My father died shortly after I was twenty-one; and being left well off, and having a taste for travel and adventure, I resigned, for a time, all pursuit of the almighty dollar, and became a desultory wanderer over the face of the earth.
Chapter I
This is the origin of the phrase "pursuit of the almighty dollar".Washington Irving coined the expressionalmighty dollar itself.
A fresh mind keeps the body fresh. Take in the ideas of the day, drain off those of yesterday. As to the morrow, time enough to consider it when it becomes to-day.
Book I, Chapter VIII
Life consists in the alternate process of learning and unlearning; but it is often wiser to unlearn than to learn.
Book IV, Chapter VII
There are times when the mirth of others only saddens us, especially the mirth of children with high spirits, that jar on our own quiet mood.
Book V, Chapter IV
Memory, no less than hope, owes its charm to "the far-away."
This demonstrates an energy of exertion, a fecundity of invention, and a readiness of composition rarely to be met with; and when taken in connexion with the unquestionable excellence of several of his works, fairly entitles him to rank as one of the most extraordinary geniuses of the age. He is, undoubtedly, in prose, whether we regard his matter or his style, one of the best of our living writers. His poetry, however, is beneath mediocrity, and cannot but produce in the minds of the thousands who have read his novels with delight, a regret that he should waste his time in putting together such an heterogeneous and unmeaning mass of metre and rhyme as is contained in the "Siamese Twins," and some other of his poems. As a novelist, he is, without doubt, the most popular writer now living.
'Novel Writing',American Quarterly Review, No. XXXII (December 1834), p. 507
You could not have theVictorian Age without him. And this was not due to wholly superficial things like his dandyism, his dark, sinister good looks and a great deal of the mere polished melodrama that he wrote. There was something in his all-round interests; in the variety of things he tried; in his half-aristocratic swagger as poet and politician, that made him in some ways a real touchstone of the time.
Of his own books, by far the best are the really charming comedies aboutThe Caxtons andKenelm Chillingley; none of his other works have a high literary importance now; with the possible exception ofA Strange Story; but hisComing Race is historically interesting as foreshadowing those novels of the future which were afterwards such a weapon of theSocialists.
Men crowded to the House of Commons to hear the latest performance of "the orator of the century." Epigrams, antithesis, alliteration—all the conscious tricks of the trade—were packed into his ornate harangues, which no one now remembers.
He [Charles Greville] was the vainest being—I don't limit myself to man—that ever existed; and I don't forgetCicero and Lytton Bulwer.
Benjamin Disraeli to Lady Bradford (26 October 1874), quoted in William Flavelle Monypenny and George Earle Buckle,The Life of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield. Volume II. 1860–1881 (1929), p. 688
To complete the tale of my writings at this period, I may add that in 1833, at the request of Bulwer, who was just then completing hisEngland and the English (a work, at that time, greatly in advance of the public mind), I wrote for him a critical account ofBentham's philosophy, a small part of which he incorporated in his text, and printed the rest (with an honourable acknowledgment), as an appendix In this, along with the favourable, a part also of the unfavourable side of my estimation of Bentham's doctrines, considered as a complete philosophy, was for the first time put into print.
The sensation that is excited in the literary world by the simple announcement of a new work emanating from the pen of the talented E. L. Bulwer, is the precursor of the delight to be experienced by the perusal. Bulwer is theNapoleon of English literature—the great mover of that sphere in which he shines so resplendently—the individual whose magic quill, with one single drop of ink, can make thousands reflect. He is the metaphysician-novelist of England, asde Balzac is the pride of France. His works are not merely everyday books which we throw aside never to resume, after a hasty perusal: they are standard volumes in every library—they may occasionally serve as books of reference—their philosophy raises them to an eminence far above the common tale of interest purposely written to afford a momentary amusement.
[William Henry] Harrison was speaking toBeckford about Bulwer. "A coxcomb", says Harrison. "Ay," said Beckford, "a cultivated one, and blows double!" Everybody has a spite at Bulwer because the public think him clever, and they don't.
John Ruskin, diary entry (31 May 1840), quoted inThe Diaries of John Ruskin, 1835–1847, eds. John Evans and John Howard Whitehouse (1956), p. 82
Lytton is one of the authors upon whose merits the critics have never agreed with the public. He won immense popularity in the face of generally hostile criticism, and even his success failed to obtain a reversal of the judgment. Some of his qualities, however, are incontestable. No English author has displayed more industry, energy, versatility, or less disposition to lapse into slovenliness. His last works are among his best; and though he often tried the experiment of publishing anonymously (as inThe Caxtons andThe Coming Race), his success showed that his popularity did not depend upon his previous fame.
Lytton showed courage but hardly discretion in attempting to be more of a poet or philosopher than nature had made him. He had enough talent to convince himself that he had the genius which is above talent. He wrote some excellent verses in the style ofPope, but fancied that he could also be aSpenser. His characters show more shrewdness of observation than imaginative insight, and the stories, while most carefully designed and constructed, show, not creative impulse, but dexterous management and a quick eye for dramatic effect. His curious attempts at the mysterious too often remind us of spirit-rapping rather than excite the thrill of supernatural awe. He scarcely fails, however, unequivocally, unless in his attempts at the humorous or the descriptions of the lower orders. He shows so much ability and such sustained activity of thought that the critic feels some hesitation in disputing too strongly the claims of his admirers, and only regrets that he had not written at least one novel expressing his views of life frankly and vigorously, without aiming at the ideal or at the propitiation of the respectable. It might have been less edifying, but would certainly have been more interesting than his actual achievements.
